Officials sacked for irregularities in school lunch program

Updated: 2012-11-27 16:21

By An Baijie (chinadaily.com.cn)

The education department of Hunan province dismissed five people who were found to be supplying insufficient food to students in a government-subsidized lunch program.

Each student at the Suode primary school in Fenghuang county was being given a 20-gram piece of bread and a 200-milliliter pack of milk for lunch, which is far from enough, a teacher surnamed Liang from the school wrote on her micro blog last week.

The central government gives a 3 yuan ($0.48) subsidy for each student in Hunan province in a pilot school lunch program project, which covers the province’s primary and middle schools in 37 counties.

A report in the Yangcheng Evening News said that the bread and milk were sold at 0.3 yuan and 1.6 yuan, respectively, in local shops.

Liang also said that students in the primary school were recently given seven cases of expired milk.

The county's education bureau said on Monday that it sacked the headmaster and two deputy headmasters at the Suode primary school, and that two officials at the county's education bureau in charge of the lunch program were also sacked.

An investigation team from the provincial education department has been sent to the primary school for further investigations, according to a report in the People's Daily on Tuesday.